My ENTIRE Solid-Color Jigsaw Puzzle Collection

Hi everyone welcome back to karen puzzles so as promised today, i’m going to be showing you my entire collection of solid colored puzzles. There is so much to get through, but first i just want to say that i cannot believe how many of you are now invested in my search for the little boy blue, coming home, blue springbok puzzle after the video went up. You guys gave me so many good leads to try to track down so i’m working on it. I am crossing my fingers that maybe one day i’ll get my hands on one and if i do obviously i will be making a follow-up video, but for now let’s talk about the puzzles that i do already have right in front of me. I have a few more things to share about the springbok puzzles.

I have some good information about the bits and pieces ones that come straight from bits and pieces themselves, and i heard from the son of the man who invented the spilt milk puzzles. So i have so much more like good new information about that. That you’re not gon na find anywhere else all right. So let’s get started um, let’s just start with springbok again we’ll go kind of in chronological order: [, Music, ], all right, so starting once again with little red riding hoods hood and snow white without the seven dwarves. In my last video i talked about how my search for the blue version of these puzzles led me to the site, springbok fever, which has so much information about vintage springbok puzzles on that site.

They say that these puzzles were released in 1964 and then re-released in 69 and 70. And the way that you can tell which one you have is that on the early release, this graphic on the front is actually a sticker that was stuck onto a blank cover, whereas on the later releases it is just printed straight onto the cover. Also in the early release, there was no text around the side of the box, whereas in the later releases there is text and then to figure out if it’s from 69 or 70, you can just look at the copyright date, so mine is from 1970…

So an interesting fact that i just learned about these actually came from a comment on my last video someone dug up a new york times, article from 1964. That mentions these puzzles and it turns out they didn’t re-release them for serendipity. They designed them originally for serendipity, and then i guess re-released them later once they saw that they had. You know a good product that they wanted to sell more widely. So that is fascinating.

I had never heard that before that these were originally made for serendipity and also the article does not mention the blue puzzle, so it’s possible that they had released the serendipity versions of these in 64 and then the blue one came out in 65, which is what The springbok fever website lists it, as so we’re talking about how rare these are um the red one really is not that rare. It shows up on ebay every so often, although now that i know the differences between the first release and the last release, nah like i have one from 1970, which is probably the most common. So now i really want an early one. Now the brown one that one is the most rare of the three one of them actually just showed up on ebay, and it was from this guy who said that he had just found it at an estate sale and he listed it for 12 dollars. He clearly did not know what he had because after a week of bidding, it ended up selling for 338 dollars, so that is a little bit more than i personally would prefer to spend on one single puzzle.

So i am not the one who bought it. Um. That’S probably about the price that you’re gon na have to pay. If you want to get one off of ebay or you could just start hitting up every estate sale, you can find and hope that you find one there all right. So, just like the serendipity versions of these puzzles, they had also released another promotional version of the red puzzle for a department store called joseph magnan magnon meg joseph magnin.

I had never heard of it before this. It’S been closed for a very long time, but again it’s identical to the normal version of the puzzle, except it has an extra line of text added and then this one i did know about before finding the site they released. A version of this puzzle called the spot life puzzle and it is solid red, except for a logo in the center of the puzzle for life magazine and one of those actually just showed up on ebay in, like november it only sold for fifty dollars. I don’t know why i didn’t buy it, i should have bought it, and i think this is funny um. They had a contest associated with it.

If you look at this little insert, if you finish the puzzle, you send in a picture of your finished puzzle and then you can get either a cookbook or some books from the life science library as you’ll, see with some of these other puzzles. Solid colored puzzles are so difficult that a lot of companies would offer contests where you would get something if you actually managed to finish it all right. That’S everything i have to say about these two puzzles we can move on. So next is the enchantment jigsaw puzzle. Also known as the magic mirror puzzle this one, i literally just bought off of ebay like last week, so i got it just in time for this video, so this one came out in 1972.

You can see they were still doing the round box design before they switched to the like square or rectangular box design and the pieces on this one are an extremely shiny, silver they’re, actually so pretty to look at it’s sort of like the holographic one, where they’re Just so shiny, oh my gosh, i love this. It’S so pretty. They’Re, definitely not reflective in the way that a mirror is like you can get sort of hints of color reflected off of it, but you’re not going to be like fixing your hair in this puzzle. But when i was buying this one, one of them showed up on ebay and i’d been wanting one for a while, but it was kind of expensive and two of the pieces had been chewed by a dog. So i decided to pass on that.

But then, like two weeks later, another one showed up with no damage at all and i put in an offer to the seller and i ended up getting it cheaper than the original one would have been. So i definitely think i’m going to attempt to do this. One this year, but before i do that i do have a question for the audience. The front of the box is a little grimy. You can sort of see where someone has tried to clean it before, but it still has – i don’t even know like dirt and grime on the edges, but i just have no idea how to clean this, because it’s like a paper foil and it’s old.

So i don’t want to ruin it with anything too harsh. So if anyone has any ideas on how i can very gently clean the front of this puzzle, let me know and then jumping ahead to 1979. We have the flat banana puzzle, also known as the dull banana puzzle, and this one is solid, yellow, except for the dull bananas logo. This was actually one of the first solid colored puzzles i had heard of like. I think i mentioned it in a very very early video before i had started collecting vintage puzzles.

I never thought i would actually have this, but i just bought it off of ebay a while ago and again these are somewhat rare, but they do show up fairly often you’re, probably not going to be totally breaking the bank. If you want to get your hands on one, just like set an ebay alert and keep an eye out for it, i love the yellow color on these. I think these pieces are so striking. Oh, i can’t wait to do this one. This was actually on my shortlist to do this january.

I decided to do the um the impossibles puzzles instead, but i definitely think i’m also going to be doing this one sometime this year, [ Music, ], [ Applause, ], all right, moving on to bits and pieces and the american publishing company. We have this puzzle called purple, passion which is branded with the bits and pieces logo, and then, in this pile we have this red one called the red menace. We have a yellow one called yellow peril and we have a green one called green gruesome, and i just want to acknowledge up front that the term yellow peril is now considered to be a very racist term against asian people. This puzzle came out in the 70s. It is really unfortunate that they decided to name their puzzle that i’m gon na try to not use the name anymore.

I’M just gon na call it like the yellow puzzle. So when i showed these before, i had just gotten the purple one and the red one – and i was talking about how the pieces between them are very similar to each other, which i found interesting because they come from different companies. So i reached out to bits and pieces to find out what was going on and it turns out american publishing company used to be the wholesale arm of bits and pieces. So it makes sense that these puzzles would have the same manufacturer and the boxes would be. You know the same size and shape they’re very similar to each other um, because at the time they were all kind of under the same umbrella.

Eventually american publishing company was sold. I don’t really know all the details on that, but my contact at bits and pieces did send me this scan from the first ever bits and pieces catalog where you can see this red puzzle being sold. So that was in 1984 and then, if we jump ahead to 1993, we can see the purple puzzle being sold and this one was a contest puzzle. So, just like i talked about in the last section with these. If you finished the puzzle, you would take a photo of it, send it in and then you wouldn’t really get a prize.

You would just get a certificate, but fun fact all of the names on the certificate of this catalog scan the names are of bits and pieces. Employees and two of them still work there to this day. The contest lasted for about three or four years and in addition to the purple puzzle, they also had this red one which isn’t a solid color. But it is of puzzle pieces which would definitely be tricky. And when you look at what i just happened to have.

When they gave me all that information about the contest puzzles, i really wanted to get them. I think that’s such an interesting, like category of puzzles, to collect, so i bought this one off of ebay. It’S called red alert. Unfortunately, the flower one was a little expensive when i looked at it on ebay, so i’ll probably get it eventually. I just don’t have it quite yet, and then i don’t have the catalog page for this one, but they had also released this green grass puzzle again.

As a contest puzzle – and this one is especially funny because a few years ago for april fool’s day, they pretended to release a giant green grass puzzle, but they had already released a like regular sized grass puzzle, and i guess they had just forgotten about that anyway. So that is the story of purple passion, but now, let’s look at the yellow and green ones, so this yellow one, i didn’t even know, existed until i heard from a viewer after i talked about the red one and she was like. Oh, i have a yellow one that looks exactly like your red one. Do you want it, and i was like how do more and more solid colored puzzles just keep showing up like? Yes, of course i want it, so these must have come out right around the same time, the design between them is exactly the same.

I’M trying to look between the cuts that are on the front of the box and see if they perfectly line up. I think they do, i think, i’ll, throw it into photoshop and actually lay them on top of each other, but i think it’s the exact same cut and it turns out this yellow one is very rare. Looking on worth point, it has only shown up for sale twice in the past. I don’t know decade that they’ve cataloged and again back on contest puzzles this. One says right on the front that if you complete the puzzle, you will receive an award.

Where is the information on how you get your award, though? Okay? Well, there’s nothing inside the box. Besides the pieces there’s nothing on. Oh, there is something on the back of the box.

Oh weird, okay, so i guess these are slightly different, because the red one has nothing on the back of the box and it’s more of a almost like a cardboard type of feel. Whereas the yellow one is a much glossier smooth type of paper and they have the information about getting your award, but again they don’t say where to send in the photo of your finished puzzle. Maybe there used to be a flyer inside of these, and that has just been lost to time anyway. Once i finish these, maybe i will make my own award but moving on to the green puzzle, so this one is interesting because it has the same design like the same font on the side of the box as the titles of these puzzles. But it just says super challenge.

It doesn’t say the name of the puzzle that has its own font, its own graphic design, and it’s also interesting that they went for sort of a horror, aesthetic on all of the fonts here. The box is also the same length as these big square boxes, but it’s a smaller uh rectangle box and the copyright date on this one is 1978, so it came out a year after these dead. Looking at the pieces, they look to be more of a ribbon cut. I think this one would end up being a rectangle, not a circle like all the edge pieces that i’m seeing are perfectly straight. I don’t think they’re at all curved.

This one would definitely be tricky these pieces do not look very unique at all so trying to figure out how they go together without any sort of image. To give you any other clues. This is definitely a super challenge. I kind of wonder if this graphic on the front of the box is like how the pieces, no, it can’t be, because all of these puzzle pieces on the front of the box are much more wild and wacky than any of the pieces inside. All of these are a much more standard size and shape.

It would be so much easier if the puzzle actually looked like the front of the box, but again this one has a contest. However, for this one you send in a photo or a witnessed statement of the time that you took to finish it scout’s honor and then the best time each month will be awarded a prize and a certificate. So only one person each month actually gets a prize. So if you finish it, but you do it really slowly, sorry, you don’t get anything. They say on the front that this puzzle is the toughest jigsaw challenge ever offered to the public.

It is considered by the designer to be almost impossible to complete and looking at the pieces. Like you know, i’ve done a lot of puzzles on this channel that claim to be impossible and are actually definitely doable. This one looks like it might be approaching impossible. I mean at least with the red ones. They give you the entire cut of the puzzle, so you can sort of follow along and know what you’re looking for with this one.

You don’t even get that and yeah there’s nothing on the back, no additional clues at all. Moving on to an assortment of other vintage, solid colored puzzles, let’s start with the spilt milk and the wet paint puzzles. Now i talked about the whole history of this company. In the video that i did dedicated to the milk puzzles uh back around christmas time. So if you want more details on these puzzles and the company, you can head back and watch that video, but after i posted it, i actually heard from the son of the man who invented these puzzles and his name is not credited on them.

When i looked up his name, it’s not associated with these like online in any way, so really the only way that i could have found out this information is from this man’s family, so his name is james bolback. Unfortunately, he passed away about five years ago, but his son told me that he would have been so thrilled to just see renewed interest in his puzzles. So i asked his son if he could tell me like more information about him and he said that he wasn’t necessarily a puzzler himself, but in addition to these, he had also come up with the idea for playboy jigsaw puzzles which he pitched to playboy. They rejected that idea and then the next year came out with playboy jigsaw puzzles. So you know he was a commercial artist in new york from the 50s to the 80s and then also enjoyed inventing things on the side.

So i asked the sun whether his dad seemed happy with his relationship with the synergistics research corporation, because it’s just really hard to tell from like the lawsuits and anything else. I can find about them if they were taking advantage of people or if they were in the right generally, i would think to side with the independent inventors that they worked with, and the son told me that his dad wasn’t entirely happy with the business relationship that They had, but he couldn’t give me any real specifics. So yeah i mean i love the products that this company came out with, but there are definitely a few iffy things that they seem to have done along the way, but james continued to make art until he passed away. He was an award-winning woodcarver, so clearly very talented, and i’m just really thankful that he came up with these. I think they are just some of the most interesting jigsaw puzzles.

I’Ve seen i just wish that maybe he had partnered with a company that really gave the idea the manufacturing quality that it deserved, because, as you saw in my video, the actual quality of the puzzles was really not there. So, in addition to the photos you’ve been seeing, james’s daughter also sent me this page from her dad’s portfolio and remember in the last video when i was talking about the prototype, they must have photographed for the final box. Well, this is it you can tell by seeing the graphic on the side of the box. It’S also interesting that originally he wanted the pieces to be double-sided, so it would be the exact same color on both sides. In the picture these pieces look much thicker than the final pieces ended up being they almost look like wood or plastic, and the shapes actually look like springbok puzzle shapes, oh and then also.

I wanted to share that bits and pieces sent me a catalog page that has the milk puzzles in it. I love reading these old blurbs and just seeing the old photos of how they used to market these anyway. As i said in the other video, the wet paint puzzles are the exact same shape as the milk puzzles they’re just different colors. So, as you can see, i have the blue one, i’m still looking for the red and the yellow ones. So if anyone has them that they want to sell me, please get in touch and then back to the portfolio page.

This design is completely different from the final design. I actually do like the final one better. I like how the puzzle piece motif was added. Also, you can see how the covers were supposed to have color on them which, in the final versions they did not. Although you can still see that in the photo on the back and again, he wanted the puzzle pieces to be double-sided and the pieces in the photo are much different than the final puzzle pieces and then james’s daughter also sent me this catalog cover where you can See a lot of the products that i’ve been collecting, i’m going to dig into this cover in more detail in another video, but i am just so thankful to her and her brother for being so open and generous in sharing all of these details, all right.

Moving on to the other red menace jigsaw, puzzle um, i showed this one in a haul video and put out a call for if anyone had information about game of files, unlimited the company that produced this, unfortunately, i have not heard any information about this company, so I think i’m going to open up the shrink, wrap right now and see if there’s anything else inside that might give us a few more clues. Oh my god, every time i open up shrink wrap on this channel from a vintage puzzle. I’M like, i know that i’m just bringing down so much value, but maybe the real value comes from sharing all of these puzzles to an audience. So it’s fine! It’S fine!

It’S done! It’S fine! We’Ve done it! Let’S open it up! Okay, let’s see!

What’S in here. What’S in here, what’s in here, oh literally, just a bag of pieces and nothing else, why is there so much dirt? Oh, i guess that’s just like puzzle dust. It looks like dirt, but since the cardboard is brown, i think it’s just little bits of cardboard, interesting, that the pieces seem to have a black border and then it’s just red on on the inside, i’m not seeing any other designs. It looks.

You know what no i’m just gon na open this up this bag with the tape around it. I feel like i’ve seen that before isn’t that how the um the money hunt puzzle came, it was just like a plastic bag like this, with a piece of tape around the top. I guess that was a thing in the 70s: oh wow, oh, no, there’s so much dust. There is so much dust coming out of this bag. [ Applause, ], okay yeah, so it definitely looks like the border has, has a black border on it and the border pieces are pretty tall compared to the inside pieces.

But everything else is solid red, i’m not seeing any other like surprise designs anywhere on it. The pieces actually feel like decent quality, i’m impressed by how thick the cardboard is. I think these pieces are totally fine besides the puzzle, dust interesting that they also have this kind of curvy swoopy piece shape similar to the american publishing company puzzles. Okay, i’m gon na compare them to the green puzzle. I’M gon na put them next to each other and see if how similar they look: [, Music, ], [, Music, ] and now there’s dust all over my table anyway.

The other solid colored puzzle is this double-sided white album beetles puzzle. I showed this in a haul. I don’t have a lot more else to say about it. Um. You can see that on one side it is an actual design of these records and then on the other side, it is white with just this one graphic saying the beatles.

However, i feel like calling this a double-sided puzzle like looking at these pieces. It’S a little bit of a stretch because there is just so much beveling happening on the back that, like it would not be pleasant to put it together upside down, like the edges are so sharp and you can see a total outline around them like it honestly Looks like if you just printed a normal puzzle, and then you just have white paper on the back, like lots of puzzles do, but they decided that since the beatles have a solid white album cover, they could get away with calling it a solid colored puzzle like If they were gon na market it like this, where the entire front of the box is saying that it is a white puzzle, they should have printed it the other way, so that the white puzzle was on the nicer side of the pieces and the record side Of the puzzle was just like a bonus on the back anyway. This was only released in 2008. I guess calling it vintage is a bit of a stretch. I thought this one was older than it is, but yeah, okay, speaking of more modern puzzles.

Let me just grab my small collection of modern, solid colored puzzles, so you know i had to do it. I had to bring this out again the heinz ketchup puzzle. If you haven’t seen this video on my channel um i’d recommend you go watch that this puzzle is infamous. It is such garbage. It is the worst puzzle i’ve ever seen.

They sent this to me as part of a promotion that they were doing and i attempted to do it and then i gave up because it like the pieces are not unique. At all, everything looks exactly the same, and i have better things to do with my life than try to put together this really terribly made puzzle, but i am happy that i have one because they didn’t make that many of them, so this is definitely staying in My collection for a long time, so probably the best known, solid colored puzzles these days are the ravensburger crypt puzzles. I did a video early on in the channel doing the silver one and then i actually uh gave that puzzle away. I really wish i hadn’t. I wish i still had it.

I have a contact at ravensburger and i keep asking him to send me. The silver gold and black crypt puzzles, so i can have them for a video, but he just hasn’t done it yet i’m sure i’ll get them one day. They’Re, you know not hard to get your hands on at all, but if you don’t know, ravensburger came out with the original three, the silver, the gold and the black and each one is a different cut of a puzzle which i like. It adds a little more interest to a fully solid image. Since then, they have started expanding, so they released this pink one, which is the same cut as the silver puzzle.

And then they also just recently released this gradient version, which is the same cut as the gold puzzle, and this one will definitely be a lot easier than the solid color versions, because you can figure out a lot more easily. How the p like? What order the piece is going so at some point i want to do a video comparing my time of doing the gradient version to my time doing the solid color version. They also seem to be expanding the line to more like patterns so yeah. I like that.

I think these are really interesting puzzle cuts and i can’t wait to see what else they throw on top of them and i’m happy that for their first, like actual color, that they went with pink because as we’ve seen, everybody does red, nobody does pink. I love that they did pink and then finally, we have this series from blue kazoo. I did a video a while ago, where i actually finished and solved the red puzzle, and i gave all kinds of tips for how to do difficult puzzles. That was a sponsored video from blue kazoo, but it’s a video that i’ve been wanting to make for a really long time and if you’re stuck on a puzzle, i really think all of my best tips are in that video. So, in addition to the red one, there’s also a white one and a black one, and then they also recently released mini versions of the red, the white and the black ones, which would definitely be a lot faster to do than the thousand piece version.

[, Music, ] and that’s it. So what do you think of my solid colored puzzle collection? I know that there are a few other modern, solid colored puzzles that are currently out there um. These are just all of the ones that i have collected so far. So in terms of the rainbow it seems, like everybody loves to do red puzzles.

There are so many reds there’s. Also, let’s see one pink, no orange two yellow one green one blue one purple. You know what i’m just gon na put them into a graphic. So you can see how the rainbow is distributed and then adding in all of my wishlist puzzles, look at how much red is over represented like why are there so many solid red puzzles? So i hope you guys liked all of this at jigsaw puzzle.

History again, i’m still working on some new leads to hopefully one day get my hands on the solid blue little boy, blue, coming home, so stay tuned for an update on that and remember if you want to support my channel and support more jigsaw, puzzle. History type of videos you can sign up for my patreon, which is where i post bonus, videos everybody at three dollars a month and above everybody, gets all the same perks and over there i’m resurfacing these old like long time lapse. Puzzle videos that i used to make so this week i think i’m going to bring back the ice cream puzzle by sico. So if you want to watch me solve that for like a full hour, it’s really nice just to have on in the background, while you’re doing other things that is all up on patreon, so i will have the link right down below. So i would love to know in a comment: have you ever done a solid colored puzzle, and is it anything that you would ever want to take on or which of the puzzles that i showed do you think you would be most interested in trying?

I think your code word will be uh red, so many red puzzles. Why does everybody make a solid red puzzle? Okay, i need to go. There’S like construction outside there’s construction, like literally in the building and also down the street. So i kept having to stop for noises, so luckily i got through the video, so i’m gon na go and i will see you all in my next one.